Propaganda Watch: Russian Social Media Ads–6/1/19
June 1, 2019 12:00 pm EDT MrsMaryLou Propaganda Watch (Open Thread) 170 Comments
 Russian President Vladimir Putin superimposed into a Russian Flag. Image by Lenny Ghoul.This is part of an ongoing series where I review some of the ads purchased by the Russians. In doing so I hope we can get a better understanding of what they were trying to do, and how to recognize it the next time we’re faced with propaganda.
If you want to follow along, the ads can all be downloaded here. All of today’s ads can be found in the 2015-q4/2015-12 folder.
Love them or hate them, the police were still popular fodder for division in December 2015. There were a couple ads mocking them, as seen in ad p(1)0000475:
  A side note–Sarah Silverman, the comedian featured in that ad, did not know she was being used by Russian trolls. In an unfortunate coincidence, a month later she would re-tweet a post by a fake Russian Twitter account.
That was not the only ad to have fun at the expense of cops. P(1)0000477 did also:
  As extreme as the anti-cop ads were in their disrespect, the pro-cop ads were reverent, as seen in p(1)0000632:
  One thing there wasn’t was a middle ground in these ads. Either the police were painted as buffoons or angelic.
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